10.09.07
Posted in life at 5:48 am by mridley
This may not be news for anyone else (see these old annoucements that I missed here and here), but I just read in this Washington Post article that CBS has some of their shows available on Joost. I’ve been a Joost beta user for some time (earlier review), but initially I felt that their available programming was rather lackluster which lead me not to use the service much. Also their earlier clients were incredibly slow on my computer. The latest version of the Joost beta software has gotten a lot snappier and now that they have content I might actually watch I’m a lot more interested. I have been catching up on their series Moonlight (which really seems a lot like Forever Knight) and while I’m not sold on the show, the viewing experience is very workable.
Tags: Joost, CBS
Permalink
10.08.07
Posted in business, tech at 5:45 pm by mridley
By clicking on a banner ad on the Washington Post, I found a link to the first annual Creative Economies conference being held October 24-25 in Tysons Corner, VA. I’m really interested in this subject (Wikinomics was mentioned on this site here and here). I’d love to go to this conference but unfortunately my schedule and my budget won’t permit. It’s frustrating to have something like this taking place so close and not be able to make it. Maybe next year. If you attend, let me know what your experience
is!
Tags: Creative Economies
Permalink
Posted in education at 9:41 am by mridley
I saw this news article (via slashdot) that UC Berkeley is making some of its course lectures available via video on YouTube. I’m looking forward to checking this out.
I’ve been a fan if MIT’s OpenCourseWare for a while, but MIT does not have all that many video lectures available. OpenCourseWare seems aimed more to the educational community in helping them come up with curricula by providing lecture notes, syllibi, etc.
Although some lecture videos are available, it’s something of an after thought and not their primary mission. I’ve gotten a lot out of the several that I’ve watched, though, and hope to have an equally enriching experience with the Berkeley content.
Tags: Berkeley, YouTube
Permalink
Posted in tech at 1:14 am by mridley
This site is now running Wordpress 2.3 which came out a couple weeks ago. I’m excited about the built in tags support. Not sure exactly how that works but since I have been tagging things by hand for ages I’m hoping this will automate that for me (yes, I am aware that tagging plugins have been available for years; I just never used them).
EDIT: If you look at the top of this post you will see that it is indeed tagged and that the feature does work. The theme I use for this site is a modified version of Ocadia which apparently doesn’t support tagging out of the box. I had to update it to put in the the_tags template tag code, but other than that the tagging works out of the box.
One change is that now instead of the tags linking to technorati’s tag search engine they link to this site’s tagging system. That’s different behavior than I’m used to, but I think it may actually be better so I’m going to leave that alone for now.
Permalink
Posted in tech at 12:33 am by mridley
Most of the stuff I find on slashdot I don’t bother mentioning here, since I figure plenty of people read slashdot and they can find out about that stuff for themselves. Every so often, though, I’ll duplicate an entry. Frankly I do this because I want to remember it later and this allows me to go back and search for it in a year when I can’t remember where I found it.
Having said all that, I read this story on slashdot about glTail.rb, an OpenGL log visualization program. There’s a video at the site and I suggest checking it out. Basically it parses a web server log and graphically displays server hits.
I really think visualization is something that we miss in infrastructure management tools. Of course all monitoring programs include some graphing capabilities, but there is a huge opportunity for systems data visualization to come out of the 1980s and into the 21st century. It’s somewhat surprising to me with the scale of today’s infrastructures that we don’t do better 3D data visualization.
As an aside, I was skimming through the slashdot comments and found a couple links which I had seen in the past but forgotten about. Visitorville is a web analytics program that uses a city metaphor. Sort of “the sims” meets Google Analytics. There was also a link in the comments to the Doom as a system administration tool page. That project is very old and crusty now, and was never practical in the way it was implemented, but still a creative idea.
Permalink
